


Hoard

by RosemarysBabysitter (TashaElizabeth)



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types
Genre: Kidnapping, M/M, Stockholm Syndrome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-18
Updated: 2015-11-18
Packaged: 2018-05-02 04:58:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5235035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TashaElizabeth/pseuds/RosemarysBabysitter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for a tumblr prompt 'Francis is setting things up to kidnap Chilton, but one day he sees Chilton's real, scarred face and he becomes very interested and like super emotional because he thinks Chilton might relate to him'</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hoard

**Author's Note:**

> This story uses language that is appropriate to the book _Red Dragon_ , but not to the television series.

Someone threw a glass of water in Chilton’s face. He woke with a start, head jerking up from where it had been lolling on a chair, chin coming down to protect his soft neck. His mouth and throat burned and his left eye stung with a familiar pain that let him know he had been asleep without the lid closed, the glass eyes staring resolutely forward. He pressed his palm to the lid and shook the water from his cheeks.

Before him was a man, loose and easy in a kimono and netted face mask pulled to just under his nose. His voice was firm. “Take it off.”

He felt the makeup he wore running sticky under his hand. “I don’t…” He stopped and gasped, began again. “I do not understand. Where am I? What is going on?” The man leaned down, hands on the arms of chair Frederick sat in. Frederick could see the fury coiled in every inch of him. A sick understanding fluttered in Frederick’s mind.

“You know where you are,” the Dragon said, leaving no room for disagreement. 

Frederick swallowed and nodded, frantically.

“You know who I am.”

Frederick looked at him for a long moment. Tears welled in his eyes. He nodded again.

“Then take it off.”

With shaking fingers, Frederick grabbed at the buttons of his shirt, undoing them halfway down the line of his chest before the Dragon grabbed him and shook him back in his chair. His head hit the seat back roughly.

“The eye,” the Dragon snapped. “It’s false, correct?”

“Yes,” Frederick said. “Yes. It’s glass.”

“Take. It. Off.”

Frederick moved with delicate ease, pinching the prosthetic out and dropping it into the curl of his fingers.

“And your face. Whatever that is.”

Frederick wiped his cheek on the inside of his unbuttoned shirt. Layers of makeup came away, revealed the ruddy scar.

“The bridge. Does it come out?”

Frederick raised a hand in surrender, pushing at the air in front of the Dragon ineffectually, as though he could ever manage to fend him off. “If I take them out,” he said, his voice high with panic. “ I won’t be able to talk, and I do so want to talk to you, sir. I want to understand. Please.”

The Dragon grabbed Frederick by his hair, put another hand on his chin and pulled one from the other until Frederick whined. The Dragon growled at him for a long moment before he spoke. “You will take them out so that I can see your cunt-face. I will tell you when I want to hear your words.”

Frederick put the glass eye in his breast pocket and undid the delicate clasps to remove his dental prostheses. His face sagged into its new shape and he looked miserably back up at Dragon. Shame burned in his cheeks. The Dragon looked back at him and then, startlingly, tugged back the mask to see him more clearly. He took a gasping breath and there was confusion in his eyes. 

“Put them back,” he whispered. Frederick hastened to obey, turning his face down to hide the process. The contours of his face restored, he reached for the eye in his pocket and instead met the Dragon’s hard, strong hands, clasping around his wrists. The Dragon dragged Frederick to his feet and tossed the man effortlessly over one of his heavily muscled shoulders, straightening into a fireman’s carry. The glass eye clattered on the floor.

The Dragon strode through the house and wrenched open the door to one of the single rooms on the ground floor. The light in the ceiling had burnt out long ago. There were no windows. He dumped Frederick into the darkness there and slammed the door, pulling shut the bolt lock.

“What are you going to do with me?” Frederick heard himself shriek.

“I’m don’t know yet.” The voice which came through the door was low and muffled. “Wait.”

Frederick waited in the dark for what felt like a long time. First he lay on the floor with his hands over his mouth to keep from screaming. Then when he could breathe again he got to his knees and crept on the floor, finding the wall on one side and a knocking over a table in the corner before he found the single bed and its dusty, thick cotton sheets. Putting it at his back, he put his hands on the bookcase, the broken standing lamp, explored the drawers of the shallow dressers. There were things in here. Mops and brooms, a bucket, old books. There was a bed pan under the bed. He would have to use it eventually, fumbling in the dark with the rank smell lingering in the air. There were hooks hanging over the bed. He tried to wrench one from the wall, but it only spun on its screw. Finally he sat down on the bed and focused on the beating of his heart. 

The Dragon didn’t know what he would do with him. He hadn’t prepared this. The concept seemed important. It ricocheted around Frederick’s mind looking for something to connect to. He didn’t know what to do after he saw Frederick’s face. And yet he must have known. It was mentioned in the newspaper articles. His own book detailed the great lengths to which Hannibal Lecter had gone to ensure Frederick Chilton was shot in the head. The Dragon would know the devastation. 

Still there hadn’t been pictures until after the reconstruction. Frederick had made sure of that. Even if he’d felt the strange shape of Chilton’s jaw under his flesh when the chloroform soaked rag was pressed to him. He wouldn’t have seen. Not until that moment. 

Frederick had never been much of a profiler. He brought his knees to his chest and waited.

“Do you know?” the Dragon asked later. He was curled in the doorway. The lights were off in the hallway behind him and there was only the meager outline of the half moon to light a halo over his head. “Do you know why Hannibal Lecter did that to you? To your face?”

Frederick had crawled back the length of the bed when the door slammed open. He did not take the plate which had been thrust out to him. He could smell stale bread over the dust.

“He was setting me up,” Frederick said. “He forged a lot of evidence to indict me and then he wanted me dead so that I could not argue otherwise.”

The Dragon shook his head. “No.”

The silence between them was tense. Frederick swallowed the acrid taste of fear in his mouth. “You said you did not know what you were going to do with me,” he began. It still seemed important. 

The Dragon hissed. “I was going to glue your skin to a chair and then set you on fire.”

Frederick winced. He recognized the death as one Will Graham had designed. “I’m very glad that your did not.” He grasped at his ideas without understanding. “I’m glad that I was allowed to...to show myself to you instead.”

The Dragon was on him in an instant, hands on Frederick’s temple, growling against his face.

“Hannibal marked you,” the Dragon said. “He marked you for me. So that I could find you.”

Frederick’s tongue got lost in his mouth too long and when he said, “Yes, of course,” it rang false with disbelief in the dark. Angry, the Dragon rose and turned to go, shutting the door behind himself. “Wait!” Frederick said, tumbling off the bed in his haste. “Can you bring me a light? So I can see you? Please?”

The Dragon chuckled at a private joke. “I will bring you a light.”

He came back later with a tall block. A single candle to flicker on the floor.

Sometimes the candle would burn itself out in a puddle of its own wax while Frederick made himself sleep. When he woke up in the dark he would cry, panicked and breathy, like a child. The Dragon would come then, sometimes, drawn to the sounds of his tears. Sometimes he would bang on the door and yell for Frederick to shut his stupid fucking mouth. Sometimes he would slip into the darkness with Frederick and wrap an arm around him, pulling him to his heavily muscled chest and stoically stroking his face until the tears dried up.

When the candle was burning, when the Dragon lit the candle for him, Frederick would lay on the floor and put his face close to it, letting it dazzle his good eye. He would put his hands over it, singing his skin to feel its heat. He would think about starting a fire, the books first and then the bedclothes until the room would go up in light and pain. When the Dragon came to talk to him, his muscles shimmered in the bobbing light. Frederick traced the lines of those muscles with his gaze while they spoke until he knew them as intimately as if they were his own body.

The Dragon told him things he didn’t know if he should believe. Told him, Hannibal Lecter had escaped. Told him, Will Graham had disappeared. Frederick had spent so many nights waking up in panic at the notion that Hannibal Lecter should escape but when it really happened, all he cared about was the bottle of water the Dragon had brought with the news. There was a drop of lemon in the bottle, to sweeten the taste. A drop of sunshine. Of kindness. 

He didn’t know how long the Dragon kept him in the dark, picking at the bread the Dragon brought to make himself eat, the taste of his unbrushed teeth sweet in his mouth. Still, it was long enough that when the Dragon let Frederick out into a late afternoon, Frederick’s heart filled up with so much joy he thought he’d die from it. He threw himself on the ground, kissing the Dragon’s bare feet. The Dragon pulled him upright and took him to the living room, let him sit on the sofa almost like he was a person again. 

The Dragon had an old projector and a screen. He put on movies, threading the film through the delicate mechanism. Frederick watched his hands work the machine with interest. They watched movies of predator animals, of shark attacks and lion hunts. They watched home movies of happy smiling families, the children putting on plays in dress up clothes, beach trips, happy birthdays. They watched other movies. 

Night after night, endless reels of film. 

The dead smell of the close dusty room was so much worse after those nights of freedom. The boredom made him want to scream. Frederick sat close to the Dragon’s side at night and watched attentively. None of the movies had sound. The projector would tick and sputter. Sometimes the Dragon would put on music. Frederick liked the music the best. Sometimes, the Dragon pulled him close, an arm around him, a heavy pressure in soft silk.

The Dragon wore the house key on a chain around his neck. Once, as a test, he let Frederick take it and go to the front door to lock it. Frederick scurried to obey, sticking his head out for a single illicit breath of fresh air before returning the key to the Dragon’s neck. Not long after he was allowed out during the day, while the Dragon was gone doing whatever it was the Dragon did. 

He had chores to occupy his hands and mind while the Dragon was gone. It was an impossible list of chores, never written down, always mumbled to him in a long litany before the Dragon locked the front door behind him and got into his van. He never finished them all and the Dragon didn’t always notice that they were done. He scrubbed out rooms that had been kept shut up for years, swept warped and weathered floorboards, polished old silver, burned clothes that had been stained with blood. The house was huge and near dilapidation. Some of the doors of the house were locked and he let his mind skip over those rooms and didn’t wonder what was inside. It never occurred to him not to work. He could wash himself too, sitting in the claw foot tub with the tepid water up to his waist. If he wanted, he could brush his teeth and comb his hair. He did these things by touch. All the mirrors in the house were broken.

One day, when he was sweeping the living room, the curved shape of his glass eye came skittering out from under a chair. He looked down at the noise, but didn’t pick it up from the dust and grit. He swept it with the rest into the dustpan and deposited it into the trash. 

“Where would Hannibal go?” the Dragon asked him. They were in the kitchen and Frederick was chopping carrots for dinner. He could use knives now, another square inch of trust. He could go outside too, into the garden, to the hang sheets on the laundry line or to heap leaves out of the broken fountain. 

Frederick put the knife down and thought. Frederick thought hard. “The police will look for him in Europe,” he began. “Because that’s where he went before, but I think... I think...” He beamed as he spoke, proud to have figured it out. “I think he’ll go to Japan. If Graham’s with him especially. There’s things he’ll want to show him in Japan. The feds will think two white men can’t hide in Japan, but they can. There are villages in the countryside that are almost abandoned. And Hannibal speaks the language or reads it or something. I remember books in his house.”

He went to the Dragon and impressed himself against the broad chest.

“Then we’ll go to Japan,” the Dragon said. Tilting down, he kissed Frederick and Frederick’s heart fluttered. The Dragon liked to hold Frederick’s face between his hands and kiss him, all over but especially his mouth and cheek and the delicate lid of his dead eye. 

Not entirely dead, he would later admit when the Dragon pressed him for details. Without the glass eye, sometimes, depending on the light, he could see in his extreme periphery a ghostly shape, a red mist without form or detail. 

“That’s me,” the Dragon whispered in his ear. “That’s me. Always beside you,” and now Frederick believed him.


End file.
